


Adjustment

by NightsMistress



Category: AI: The Somnium Files (Video Game)
Genre: Non-Consensual Drug Use, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-25
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-11 02:49:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,276
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28088019
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NightsMistress/pseuds/NightsMistress
Summary: Date wakes up in a bad mood, but his mind is set at ease after he's able to solve a case by psyncing with the victim.Or: Date's meds need adjustment, and ABIS does what it can. It's a pity Date can't know about any of that.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 24
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Adjustment

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Khantael](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Khantael/gifts).



> My thanks to my beta, GaleWrites!

He is an alley. It’s cold and dark, and the gun in his hand fits the planes of his palm as if made for him. There’s movement at the end of the alley, which he expects. He aims the gun, pulls the trigger —

— and then the alarm cut through, waking Date up with a start. He flailed with one hand and hit the alarm with the edge of his hand. That did nothing, as it was an electronic alarm, but he hit it a few more times to make his displeasure known. He’d been up the previous night, trying to find a comfortable position to sleep in, but it seemed that no position would ease the deep-seated ache in his muscles. After the third night of broken sleep, the thought of finally getting some sleep only to have it stolen from him by the alarm was almost too much to bear. So he hit the alarm one more time before sitting up to turn it off before he was forced to throw it against the wall.

The brisk winter air was a shock, even with the heater on, and he considered whether he should have thrown the alarm against the wall. He picked up the alarm, gauged its weight, and decided against it when he read the time. He’d apparently slept through another alarm. Not that he could tell, given how uncomfortable he felt. It wasn’t like he was sick, but instead a simmering dissatisfaction with everything in the world, a sentiment that was not eased by the fact that he only had fifteen minutes to get ready for work.

He dragged himself from his bed to the hanging rail that he used as a wardrobe. At least this did not require much thought, as Date had decided several weeks ago to simply buy several versions of the same outfit of pants, shirt, long coat and gloves. Normally, putting this outfit on settled his mind, as if the layers of fabric were a tactile reminder that though he had lost his memories, he was still Special Agent Date Kaname. Today, however, the fabric felt like a tourniquet, as if he was trapped inside something alien to him and he wanted to tear off his own skin to find the real him. It was irritating, because he didn’t understand why he felt this way, and he didn’t like that he didn’t understand it. He had nothing else to wear, however, so he tolerated it.

He still had several minutes, enough time to make coffee. He made it in the usual way, took a sip, and made a face at the bitterness. He wasn’t sure what he had expected; he had craved something sweet and instead made his coffee black and without sweetener. His fridge, on inspection, was all but empty, and the only thing left inside it was a mostly empty bottle of milk that had expired a few days ago. He opened the bottle, sniffed it, and when it did not make him instantly gag at the smell concluded that it was perfectly fine to pour into his coffee along with a teaspoon of sugar.That wasn’t enough, so he spooned in more. The coffee still wasn’t sweet enough, so he kept adding more with each sip.

“I can’t believe that sugar has an expiry date,” he grumbled, as he stirred in a sixth teaspoon of sugar. He had never heard of sugar having an expiry date, but it was possible that it was one of the things that he had forgotten. It was the only explanation for why multiple teaspoons, normally overwhelmingly sweet, was this time just barely sweet enough. At least one thing was going in his favor.

After all of that, he was late. He sighed sharply, dumped the mug in the sink, grabbed his keys from the bench, and headed out the door.

***

Snow on the road made driving difficult, and to compound matters everyone was driving too cautiously for Date’s liking. People were consistently driving ten kilometres under the speed limit and slowing even further for corners. Each time traffic ground to a crawl, Date’s stress level rose, like he was a spring that was constantly being tightened. By the time he reached the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department, he had a white knuckle grip on the steering wheel and his jaw ached from his clenching it.

People moved out of his way as he stalked down to Boss’ office. Some people looked at him strangely as they got out of his way, but no one said anything to him. He pushed the door open with his foot, kicking it shut behind him.

Boss was sitting on her desk, legs crossed and arms folded loosely across her chest, and looking at him with a nonplussed expression.

“You’ve arrived,” she said. “I was starting to wonder if you’d been in an accident.”

He’d been annoyed before when no one said anything to him, but her expression of concern annoyed him as well because it seemed genuine and he didn’t want it.

“No,” Date said shortly. He didn’t sit down, even after Boss gestured for him to do so. She raised an eyebrow but said nothing about it.

“Now that you’re here, we have a job for you,” she continued. “There was a robbery yesterday. Sato Sara, age twenty-five. She returned home from a nomikai to find someone in her apartment. There was no signs of forced entry, and the only things take were personal effects such as —”

“Boss,” Date said, cutting her off mid-sentence. “Can we just get the psync done? I don’t have time for this! Not if you want us to find this guy and make him confess to it.”

He was louder than he expected. The top of the metal chair he was standing behind was cold under his hands. He didn’t remember grabbing it, especially with such force that his fingers ached from it.

“You know you need to know the subject for the psync to be successful," Boss said. She paused, and then asked, almost casually, "Are you feeling all right?” She hadn’t moved from her perch on the edge of her desk and looked unruffled by his outburst. It was only because he had worked with Boss so closely for the last six months that he could recognize the way her attention sharpened on him. There was something about the way that she angled her head and pursed her lips that gave it away.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” Date bit out. He forced himself to let go of the chair and then, at a loss for what to do with his hands, folded his arms tightly across his chest. “I just have things to do. That’s all.”

He didn’t expect that to satisfy Boss’s interest, and from the way she continued to look at it she was still interested. He could see her putting her thoughts together but couldn't see the conclusion.

“I suppose you’re right,” she said, giving nothing away. “Let’s get you set up.”

Date followed her into the psync facility. Pewter was already in the control room, fussing with something on his computer screen. Date glanced at his screen as he walked past him towards the machine itself. It looked like he was doing some coding thing, and Date dismissed it as being irrelevant to him right now.

The subject was already in the psync room, mask over her face and slackly unconscious. There was a bruise underneath her left eye, luridly purple in the cold light. Date gave her a cursory look but didn’t see any other injuries. He laid down on his side of the psync machine, squirming to find a position that was comfortable. The muscle aches from earlier were back.

He could hear murmuring over the microphone, and craned his head to see Pewter and Boss talking. They were too far away for the microphone to pick up anything more distinct than the aural shape of their words, so he put it out of his mind. He sighed, let his head fall back, and let himself sink into the chair as it lifted him up and into position.

The mask descended over his face, plunging him into darkness.

“Remember, Date,” Pewter said over the microphone. “You have six minutes and no longer.”

“I _know_ ,” Date growled. “You tell me this every time.”

There was a moment of silence, all the more fraught because Date couldn’t see Pewter’s face. While Boss was difficult to read, Pewter was an open book. Not being able to see his face seemed like he was missing half of what Pewter was saying, and that was almost enough to make Date take his mask off. Almost.

“What?” Date prodded when Pewter didn't respond.

“Woke up on the wrong side of the bed again?” Pewter said archly.

“Yes,” Date said. “But that doesn't explain why you need to tell me this every time. Did you think I forgot?"

"It's important for you to remember. Why are you so upset about this?"

"It doesn’t matter though. Just get on with it.”

A pause, presumably a shrug that could not be seen. Then, utterly indifferent, “Of course.”

The psync machine started with an almost inaudible hum that sent a shiver down the length of Date’s spine. He closed his eyes under the mask and felt the break in his consciousness as he moved into the subject’s Somnium.

***

Date opened his eyes to Sato Sara’s Somnium but his eyes wouldn’t focus. His head felt fuzzy and his limbs heavy, and he closed his eyes against a wave of dissociation and the sensation of having lost time.

“Date,” Boss said sharply. “Reorient yourself.”

Date pressed his fingers together in sequence — thumb to thumb, fingers to fingers — until he felt like himself again. Of late, psyncing into another person made him feel unsettled and muddled. It always passed, but it was disconcerting despite that knowledge.

Once he felt ready, he opened his eyes to see what he could see.

The Somnium was a bedroom, dominated by a bed and a bedside table, the floor covered with strewn clothing and smashed bric-a-brac. Some of it looked like it had been caused by the burglary, but some did not. The bedlinen was rumped and, as Date rested his hand on it, still warm on one side. The other side was cold, and he pulled his hand away with a start when lightning struck his arm.

He could interact with the bed despite the lightning, which meant that it was important somehow. A lover, perhaps, or an unrequited crush. He wouldn’t know until he started experimenting, so Date pulled the blanket off the bed in order to remake it. As he smoothed the rumpled sheets, the lightning stopped arcing against his skin, settling down to a mere background hum and then, when he pulled the blanket back over the bed, the lightning disappeared entirely. He lifted a pillow to place it on top of the blanket only for a torn up photograph to fall from the slip like confetti to spill across the floor.

“No use crying over a spilled photo,” Date said, and snickered at his own joke. He then knelt down on the floor and started to piece the photo together. Each scrap of paper was shaped like a little puzzle piece, and he grinned as each piece fitted together neatly with its neighbors.

It was as he was putting together the outside border of the photo puzzle that he could hear someone talking. They weren’t quite audible, and had a strange echo effect, so Date kept working until he could hear them.

“The refraction period’s getting shorter. Can we really keep this up?” It was a man speaking. He sounded nervous.

The other speaker, a woman, was ruthlessly practical in contrast to his fussy energy.

“We have to,” she said. “Until you finish your project, this is the best we can do.”

The man sighed. “You ask for the impossible, you know?”

“I know. Because I know you can do it.”

“Yes, yes, flattery will get you everywhere.”

It was at this moment that Date finally placed where he had heard the voices before. He didn't understand why they sounded strange, but it was best not to think too hard about things in a Somnium.

“Huh,” he said aloud. “I didn’t know Sato knew Pewter and the Boss.”

“Date, you have four minutes,” the real Pewter said, sounding flustered for some reason. The echo effect was gone. Perhaps it was a memory or something else that he had just stumbled across. Date shook his head in wry amusement. Perhaps he had stumbled on some secret part of Pewter’s life. He’d have to look into it later, and ferret out what it was. For now though, he had to finish piecing together the photograph.

As the puzzle took shape he could see that it was a photograph of two people, Sato Sara, and a man, clearly in love by the way they leaned into one another while smiling at the camera. Once he could see that, the rest of the puzzle came quickly. Once completed, there was movement on the wall. Date looked up to see a door form where previously was just a wall.

On the other side of the door was a small bathroom: a shower, toilet and sink. There were two toothbrushes in a cup, with characters written on them, and chained together at the base. Date looked at the characters, but couldn’t make sense of them. He fingered the chain, his fingertip catching on the hairline fracture on the base of one of the toothbrushes. The chain itself was flimsy and, as he ran his fingers along its length, broken in a number of places. The solution seemed obvious, so Date held a toothbrush in each hand and pulled his arms apart. The chain shattered, splashing blood all over the floor. He put the two toothbrushes back into their cup, and was rewarded by the sensation of a lock undoing in the Somnium as one toothbrush disappeared.

The Somnium shifted from the bathroom to a living room, furnished with a shabby sofa, a television, and a myriad of photographs on the walls. There was a person sitting on the sofa, a woman by her silhouette, and she seemed to be looking at her phone. There was a knock on the door, the woman stood up eagerly to answer it, and opened it to a taller person, presumably a man by his height and build, standing in the doorway. They argued, and then he pushed his way into the apartment. She followed him, pulling at his arm, but he pulled off every photograph from the wall and throwing them to the ground. Every time a photograph hit the ground, it shattered into translucent, wickedly sharp pieces that cut the woman’s legs as she walked behind the man. The man pulled his arm away from the woman and caressed her face, before leaving again.

The woman — Sato Sara — stared at the man as he left, knee deep in the wreckage he had left of her life. She reached out a hand to his retreating back, but he never turned around.

Date, on the other hand, did. As he turned his back to her, he felt the second lock undo, and closed his eyes against the dissociation that came with completing a Somnium.

***

Date woke with a start, clawing at the mask to see when and where he was. The feeling of dissociation and lost time was stronger now, and when the mask lifted away from his face he covered his eyes with his forearm until he adjusted to being awake. He was in the psync room, cool and familiar as always.

He swallowed against the disorientation and grogginess that lingered as he wobbled into a sitting position. Here, he breathed deep and slow, and with each breath felt more of himself. He was Date Kaname, he was a Special Agent within ABIS, and he knew who he was.

"What's your name?" Boss said from where she stood in the control room. She sounded unconcerned, but he could see the tension by the way she held herself away from the table rather than leaning into it.

"Date," Date said, puzzled and a little concerned. "Date Kaname."

She proceeded to ask him the usual orienting questions - name, date, location - and the thread of tension within her unspooled with each answer. Date hadn't been asked these questions in months, but there had been that strange echo effect in the Somnium so perhaps there was something buggy in the system. Finally, the questions ceased and she invited him to come up to the control room.

“What did you see?” Boss asked once he was inside.

Pewter had assured Date that in the future they would be able to see everything he saw and understand it as he did. That seemed a long way off, and at the moment, Date was left to try and interpret what he saw. Most of the time he didn’t bother trying to explain the dreamlike logic that drove a person’s Somnium, as the process could only be understood through observation and not description.

“It’s her ex-boyfriend,” he said instead.

“Are you sure?”

“Positive.” He didn’t remember having a serious partner like Sato Sara had once, but the devastation that came with a broken relationship was familiar somehow. He supposed it was all of the relationships he had had before he lost his memory; you could make new relationships, but every so often the remnants of the old relationship would cut surprisingly deep.

“She recognized him,” he said in lieu of explaining all of that. It seemed something personal, though it was personal to him or to Sato, he wasn’t sure. Reminded of Sato, he looked around. She didn’t appear to be detained nearby, which was odd. Normally a subject was kept close so that they could be questioned afterward about what the psyncer saw. “Where is Sato?”

“She was questioned by Inspector Kaneda and released,” Boss said.

“What?”

“You’ve been unconscious for almost an hour,” Pewter said, to Date’s consternation. “Sometimes the psyncer stays unconscious longer. It’s to do with the psyncer’s memories. Their brain wants time to assimilate them without additional input.”

“That’s some side effect,” Date muttered. “Can you fix it?”

“I’m working on it,” Pewter said. “Give me some more time, some more funding…”

“How are you feeling?” Boss asked, interrupting Pewter before he could wax lyrical about his limited budget for the third time that month.

“Fine,” Date said, and meant it. “Pretty good, actually. I must have been really tired.”

“Yes, perhaps that’s it,” Pewter agreed.

“And we got some good data to give to the Crimes Unit. Sato will be able to get her things back now.”

“Yeah. I’ll pass it on after we’re done here.” Boss smiled then. “Good work, Date.”

“Not a problem,” Date said easily. He felt a little off-kilter and off balance, but it was reassuring to know that there was an explanation for why he felt that way. “Just get that issue with the machine sorted out, won’t you?”

“Yes, yes, of course,” Pewter said snippily. “Don’t you have somewhere to be?”

“Yeah, I guess I do.” Date turned to Boss. “Can I get out of filing a report?”

“No.”

“Slavedriver,” he complained, but without heat. The bad mood of earlier had dissipated into nothing, and he even looked forward to doing the report if it meant that a crime got solved and the perpetrator caught. “I’ll see you around.”


End file.
